Hi, my name is Don!

November 7, 2008

Getting connected

It’s been a while since I’ve had internet at home. I’ve been using my friend’s from across the street but the signal is so slow that all I could do was send and receive instant messages. I needed something more reliable and I didn’t want to keep going to Tim Horton’s to use the city’s wireless. I needed my own and I came to the conclusion that I could work out my budget to accommodate for it.
I called up Bell since they seem to have the best price for what I was looking for. I didn’t want anything quick and allow me a lot of bandwidth. I just wanted something decent for a low price. I don’t plan on download a lot and I won’t be online for that long. I spend most of my days at work anyways so it didn’t make sense to me to spend $50 a month for a connection that would have gone to waste.

The package that I went with allowed me to download and upload up to 500 Kbps. There’s a good chance that I won’t see those speeds but it’s not a big deal. They gave me a 2GB bandwidth which should be good enough. I surf around a lot but it’s not like I stream movies all the time. I’ll get ten hours of dial-up usage when I need it and I’ve got a 5MB online storage for whatever.

The plan comes with a whole bunch of security and pop-up blockers and stuff but I don’t need those. They probably added those extras in to get people to order more so they can get more money. I already have the necessary protection on my computer so I don’t need to pay for any extra ones.

They said that they’ll be sending me a wireless home networking kit so I can allow more than one computer to be online at a time. The lady on the phone mentioned something like a maximum of four computers connected to the network. Unless that value is hard coded into the router, I’m sure it can be exceeded. There was a $20 activation fee with it but it was waived. I’m not sure exactly why there needs to be an activation fee for the wireless but I’m not paying for it so I’m happy.

If you checked on Bell’s website, this package is about $17.95 but you only get that price if you bundle it with something. That price will last for about twelve months and after that it goes up to $22.95 but what they don’t tell you is that the regular price is actually $29.95. There are a bunch of fees for modem rental and what not. I received a $5 credit which brought down my month charge to $24.95.

This plan isn’t too bad. I was looking to pay about $20 a month and I ended up paying about $10 more but it’s acceptable. Once I get everything up and running, I’ll be online a lot more than before. Lately, I’ve been offline since I can hardly get a decent signal at home. No more free internet for me.